Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
Savosavo Kinship Terminology: Social Context and Linguistic Features
This week's paper is on kinship terminology in the Papuan language Savosavo, which is remarkable as it covers fifteen generations; a rare feature, cross-linguistically. In this week's TyPoW you can talk about your own language's kinship system. Anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan identified six basic patterns of kinship terminologies, which are listed here. Even though those are the six underlying structures that have been observed in natural languages so far, each language may modify that basis, yielding distinct results. There are also some funky elements like the so-called dual propositus tri-relational kinship terms, found in some Australian Aboriginal languages. You can read more about them on the aforementioned wikipedia page. Now onto the prompts:
- How does your language handle kinship terms?
- Which basic pattern (see above) does your conlang exhibit? Or is it impossible to categorize it like that?
- How do kinship terms interact with other cultural elements? (e.g. taboos)
- How are kinship terms used in discourse?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!